They were triangular.
A half breath slid into his lungs, then his throat locked up. Bright blue, triangular eyes…what the fuck, what the fuck?
Perry closed his eyes tight. He was hallucinating, that was all. He rubbed hard with his fists, then opened his eyes again. The breath slid out of him, slowly, then back in, deeply. His irises were round again. No, not again, they had been round all the time; it had just been another hallucination, that’s all. He blinked rapidly, feeling a semblance of control ease into his chest, then he shut his eyes again and gave them one more hard rub. He knew what he had to do. Time to jump, time to get this shit over with. He shook his head to clear it, then looked out the window-
– and found himself staring at a full-body reflection of his father. The skeleton-skinny man stared back, his gaunt face cracked by a smiling, angry expression. Perry remembered the look well; it was the look Daddy always wore just before the beatings began.
“What are you doing, boy?”
Perry blinked, shook his head, and looked again. His father was still there.
“Daddy?”
“I ain’t your daddy, boy, and you ain’t my son. No son of mine thinks of giving up. You giving up, boy?”
Perry searched for an answer but found none. Daddy was dead. This was a hallucination.
“Just because I’m dead doesn’t mean you can’t embarrass me, you little shit,” the reflection said. “Did your daddy give up when Captain Cancer came calling?”
“No, sir,” Perry said. The ingrained response to his father’s question came quickly, automatically.
“Goddamned right he didn’t. I fought that sonofabitch to the bitter end. And do you know why, boy?”
Perry nodded. He knew the answer, and he drew strength from it. “Because you’re a Dawsey, Daddy.”
“Because I’m a Dawsey. I fought till I was nothing more than the walking bag of bones you see here. I fought, you little cocksucker. I was tough. I taught you how to be tough, son, I taught you well. What are you, boy?”
Perry’s face hardened. The hopelessness vanished, replaced by angry determination. He might die, but he’d go out like a man.
“I’m a Dawsey,” Perry said.
In the window, the weak reflection of Daddy smiled his toothy smile.
Perry let go of the cord; the venetian blinds zipped closed, once again obscuring his reflection.
He turned and looked down at Fatty Patty, who was still coughing and gagging, rolling her naked roundness in her own vomit. Triangles looked up at him from her ass cheeks. He felt no pity for her, only disgust at her weakness. How could anyone be so pathetic as to just sit back and let this happen without even trying to fight?
“It’s a violent world, princess,” Perry said. “Only the strong survive.”
If she couldn’t be bothered to fight for herself, Perry sure as hell wasn’t going to do anything to save her. Besides, he wanted to watch the hatching. You can’t win, after all, if you don’t know your enemy.
She convulsed for the next five minutes, her jerky contortions flipping her onto her back. Perry wondered what might be wrong with her; the smell was overpowering, sure, but it couldn’t make someone go into an epileptic seizure, could it? What was her problem?
The question seemed to answer itself. The Triangles on her stomach began to twitch and jitter under her flabby skin, as if she suffered muscle spasms. But he saw instantly that the twitching wasn’t from her muscles.
The Triangles were moving on their own.
68.
Perry sat on the couch, transfixed by Fatty Patty’s ordeal.
They are hatching!
Hatching! Hatching!
The Triangles twitched under her skin, slowly picking up speed, jittering faster and faster. Her convulsions stopped suddenly; she rolled onto her back, fingers sticking into the air, locked like skeletal claws. Her face wrinkled in a wide-eyed blast of panic and a teeth-baring, breathless scream. It was a look of such utter, unbearable agony that Perry couldn’t suppress a shudder.
And he was next.
He felt sick, as if a gnarled hand squeezed and twisted his intestines. It was a physical reaction to a mind pulled in opposite directions. On one side he felt hopelessness, far worse than anything he’d known since this ordeal began. He watched this fat woman writhe with terror, watched her face contort and scrunch as she tried to scream but couldn’t find the air to do so. Her body shuddered in agony, making her flesh jiggle endlessly.
Despite this horror show, which held the promise of a painful death for him as well, he felt an impossible level of euphoria, a feeling that this was the beginning of something great and something wonderful. Joy and ecstasy ripped through his mind, better than any drug, vastly superior to sex-this was clearly an overflow emotion, but it was so strong, so clear, so vivid and so pure he was no longer able to separate it from his own. At that moment, the Triangle feelings saturated his very being.
He thought of killing her, slicing her throat with the butcher knife, ending her misery. But he couldn’t bring himself to stand up, to reach for the blade, because he had to know what would happen. Besides-she was dying anyway, and wasn’t a birth always a happy occasion?
A wave of fresh pain washed across her body, making her jerk like an electric-chair victim. She rolled a little from side to side, but mostly stayed on her back, that wide-eyed death stare fixed on some interesting detail of the stucco ceiling. Perry watched, surprised and disgusted, as she suddenly pissed all over the floor.
The Triangles picked up speed; they seemed to pulse as they sought to break free. Their large heads pushed out against her pliant, stretching skin, then sank back for another try. With each thrust, Perry saw the Triangles’ outlines, saw that their bodies had grown to a shallow pyramid shape.
It reminded Perry of the good old days of Jiffy Pop on the kitchen stove, the swelling volume of popcorn slowly expanding the tinfoil covering. The Triangles weren’t going to stop-they were clearly intent on popping out of her skin like a champagne cork, celebrating their new life in the new world.
Blisters burst one by one, coating her skin with thick, yellowish pus. Blood trickled from the edges of the Triangles, shooting out in thin jets each time they thrust outward.
They are hatching.
Is it beautiful? Let us see!
They are hatching. Hatching!
Perry ignored his own Triangles, his attention locked on those of Fatty Patty. Her Triangles thrust out farther, her skin started to tear. They pushed their way out like little turkey timers at Thanksgiving, the red pop-up button telling everyone when the big bird was done and it was time to eat. The three on her stomach were the worst to watch-they had started by only pushing up a quarter of an inch or so, a minor throbbing, a pulsating blister in her gut. Each throbbed up at a slightly different rate, now picking up steam, pushing out almost six inches in a quick jump, stretching the skin on her stomach like little triangular penises becoming erect and flaccid, erect and flaccid, erect and flaccid, spurting blood-threads in every direction.
He couldn’t see the ones trapped underneath her wide ass, but he imagined they struggled, pinned by the weight of her body.
There were noises. Not just the pathetic little whines escaping the weak-willed woman, but faint clicking noises as well. They grew a bit louder every few seconds and seemed to coincide with the Triangles’ outward thrusts. With each click he felt his happiness and euphoria spike upward like a heartbeat pulse on an EKG machine.
The one on her hip, the one that had stared so malevolently, so insolently, was the first to break free. It ripped out of her, not with a tearing sound but rather with a loud splurt followed by a splat as it hit the far wall, right where Perry’s Sports Illustrated cover would have hung had they been in his apartment. The hateful creature stuck, wriggling and weak, temporarily trapped in its own slime.